


to spoil an easy hexameter

by thefudge



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, F/M, Forbidden Love, ost: wildes - bare, s7 au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-02
Updated: 2019-06-02
Packaged: 2020-04-06 19:24:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19069096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefudge/pseuds/thefudge
Summary: Sometimes, for all the words she knew, talk was cheap. Jon/Missandei (season 7 AU)





	to spoil an easy hexameter

**Author's Note:**

> the jon/missandei oneshot that was promised
> 
> (or a very messy wordy draft in my Google docs, enjoy!)

Who am I to spoil an easy hexameter? 

\- madeline miller, _circe_  

 

 

***

 

Missandei of Naath knew many languages. She had even invented a few in her head. On the long nights of bondage when she could not find relief in sleep she would talk to herself in made-up tongues, secret codes that only she was privy to.

She had tried to teach the other girls one of her languages so that they all shared something the masters could not take, something practical and beautiful and _necessary_ , but they were all too tired for learning abstruse words. Missandei understood. The constant wagging of the tongue took something out of you. The more you talked, the more air and energy you expelled. Giving yourself to words was a foolish, romantic notion. 

And yet, as she tumbled back into his open arms and felt his broad chest, his wolfish beard scratching the side of her throat, all she wanted to do was speak and speak and speak, tell him all the made-up words, talk to him in as many tongues as possible, be a romantic fool. This was happiness. 

Jon was a remarkably good listener.

He loved watching her lips move and make new sounds. He used his own tongue to draw them out. She had to blushingly confess he was gifted that way, even though he sometimes butchered her very name. But then again, everyone else did too. He asked, as he kissed burning coal kisses down her belly, what the word for love-making was in her made-up language. 

Missandei whispered it to him.

Jon pressed his mouth against the apex of her thighs and rasped, “again”. 

Missandei obliged. 

He hummed, thrilled by the sound of her mellifluous accent, intoxicating like Dornish red. He took her in his mouth clumsily, lacking her grace, but making up for it in eagerness. He drank up her idiom. 

She said it again and again until it no longer bore any meaning, until it meant everything. 

 

 

 

 

“Are you asleep?” she asked. 

“No.”

“Don't fall asleep. You cannot be here in the morning, I'm afraid. You must be very careful when you leave -”

“Missandei.” He cupped her cheek. “I just want to watch you. I won't sleep.”

Her shy smile was a wonder. “You speak nonsense.”

Jon laughed. “Trust me, I wouldn't know how.”

Missandei swallowed the sweetness in her mouth. This was dangerous. She thought of her beloved Queen, the betrayal she would feel at this selfish behavior, this lack of gratitude. And yet Missandei did not lock her door. She still welcomed Jon every night. She couldn't turn him away. And he - he was a king in the North, a man who did not understand what it meant to serve, who had never felt true devotion, not really. He took pride in secretly rebelling right under Daenerys’ nose. 

Missandei had told him as much on the first night he came to her. He had made sure the guards weren't at her door when he had knocked, which had smelled to her like treason. 

“Why are you here? To plot behind her back? To plant the seeds of mutiny? I will not help you with such work.”

He’d marvelled at her metaphors. 

“No, that's not why I came, ” he’d answered gruffly. "I wouldn't insult you like that. I think you know...I just wanted - to see you.”

“In private, at night? That is still conspiracy.”

Jon had laughed meanly. “If your Queen thinks this is conspiracy maybe she shouldn't be your queen.”

Such outlandish talk, such strange, unpolished words. The people of Westeros must have been taught to say everything they wanted. She couldn't make sense of it. It was cousin with blasphemy. 

“What do you want, then, Jon Snow?”

Jon had stepped forward and had taken her hands in his gently. “I want to go back home, but I can't. I have to stay here. I have to do my duty and rally support for my people.”

He’d stroked the inside of her palm.

“Is this you rallying?” she’d asked, growing weak under his thumb. Jon had smiled. “Is it working?”

He'd kissed her afterwards, hesitantly, tasting the foreign air of her words, then closing his mouth over hers. Then cupping the back of her neck and tangling his fingers in her curls. No one had done that before, not like this, so boyishly, so unconditionally. He’d pulled her to him and held her and told her he had tried not to think of her, he had tried very _hard_ , which when he said it did not sound like a declaration of love but rather like a man pointing to his noose mulishly. Missandei had said to him, 

“What have I done to merit your affection?” and the formal yet loving way she phrased it, like a self-effacing shadow, made him want to kiss her again and again.

 

 

 

 

Jon had been spelled day by day. Like most powerful charms, it seized him before he realized what was happening. 

The first time he saw her he was only remotely appreciative of her smile, because no one on Dragonstone had smiled at his arrival. It might’ve been perfunctory but it had been a small comfort. 

She was the first woman from the true South he had ever seen and he was shamefully impressed with her grasp of all dialects, her knowledge of his world. 

But then he heard her speak more, he saw her walk as if she were treading on air, he watched her soft, determined gestures. 

There was something impossibly regal in her bearing. Something innate. It shamed him more than all of Daenerys’ titles put together. When Missandei lifted her chin just an inch and gave him that faraway, kind smile he couldn't help but genuflex a little. The trick of it was that she was the one showing him politeness, she was being self-effacing, but that only made her noble bearing stand out. Jon was quietly mesmerised by her mannerisms, her ease, her grace, her dignified meekness.

For some time he did not know why it made such a powerful impression on him. And then, one evening, he saw her sitting by the fire with Ser Davos, laughing quietly at his high tales and responding good-humoredly to his flirtations and he realized what it was. He rose and went outside to taste the sea spray and clear his thoughts. She reminded him in some obscure way of his mother, which was resoundly impossible since he had never known her. Yet in many ways this foreign girl embodied the Lady Stark that never had been, a Catelyn who would have nursed and loved him. Something of that immeasurable dignity and honeyed warmth were twined in the little scribe. It made him feel strange, this maternal yearning. How foolish to travel all the way to Dragonstone and dream of mothers. He thought with shame how puzzled Missandei of Naath would be by such childish thoughts. But ever since he had come back from the dead he had been thinking more and more about his poor mother, had been mourning her loss as if it had happened only recently. As if he had been born anew from an empty womb. 

 

 

 

 

They had got into the habit of walking on the beach together since Jon spent most of his time in the caves and needed her to translate to the Unsullied and Dothraki who helped him mine.

He had been tongue-tied at first, afraid of sounding stupid to one so eloquent, but he had found his footing eventually, because she was patient. She understood more than he said. She could decipher his silences though he could not decipher hers. 

One evening he had bent down, drawn to a pearlish glow in the sand, and he had picked up an ornate shell and he had said it might look pretty in her hair and Missandei had smiled reservedly and said she would use it to braid the Queen’s hair and Jon had frowned and shaken his head and told her that no, it was for her, meant for _her_. And that had been her first clue that perhaps the little king from the land of snow had warmed up to her, to them. Maybe this meant he would bend the knee to the Mother of Dragons.

Or not.

“I want _you_ to wear it,” he'd told her earnestly. Insisted on it, in fact. 

 

 

 

 

She remembered when he had carried her out of the cave, practically run with her on shaking knees when a formation of rocks had collapsed. She had never been in any real danger, but the cold fear which had coursed through him had made him ignore caution. He had carried her all the way up the steep steps to the ramparts and had only released her when she had touched her gloved hand to his cheek. 

“Please put me down, your Grace. I am all right.”

He had, and he had felt strange and unhappy, letting her go. 

 

 

 

 

 

Missandei ran a guilty hand over his still fresh scars. She couldn't help wanting to see them. She had been around miracles long enough to know this was one. 

But she would have been happy not to see any more miracles if it meant he would be safe. 

“You must bend the knee, even if you do not see it yet, even if you are not yet convinced. You will be. She will make a good queen, a great queen to us all. Trust in me.”

Jon caressed the small of her back, gathered her closer. He stared down at the little scribe, the beating heart of this stony island. 

“Go on,” he said hoarsely. “Ask me what you really want to ask me.”

Missandei loved that for all his knife bluntness, he understood the palimpsest of meanings behind her words. 

“Do it for me,” she said. “Bend the knee for me. It is the only way you can save your people and the continent, the only way you can -”

“The only way I can still see you and be with you, even in secret, aye,” he finished for her. 

Missandei blushed. “That - that is not true.”

He kissed her brow. “Would you go with me then? Would you let me steal you?”

Missandei shuddered. “ _Steal_ me? I was already stolen from my island.” 

Jon’s face fell. “Gods, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it like that, it's an old wildling custom only…”

Missandei dismissed his concern. She made him tell her what it meant. He told her. 

She was quiet for several moments.

“I cannot abandon my Queen and my people. We are all blood brothers now.”

Jon nodded. “I know as much. I can't abandon my people either.”

Missandei burrowed into him. “What do we do?”

Jon inhaled the cinnamon fragrance of her curls. “I’ll bend the knee. And you and your queen and your blood brothers will come North with me and once you're there I won't  let you go.”

Missandei smiled wistfully. He wanted to bring her to the land of snow and keep her there forever. A poisonous dream. She looked at his stern profile and wished that it were not true but it was.

All love was bondage in the end, the songs and poems had got it wrong. The chains of love looked sweeter and chafed less, that was all. She twined her hand with his and promised she would be his if he bent the knee. She did not tell him they were building castles in the sky, she did not tell him they were seducing themselves into perdition. After all, who was she to spoil an easy hexameter?

Sometimes, for all the words she knew, talk was cheap. 

 

 

 

 

(when Sansa asked him if he had given up the North because he was in love with the Queen he nodded shamefully, letting her believe he was staring with longing at the Mother of Dragons and not the little scribe sitting to her right.

She still wore the pretty, empty shell on a chain around her neck, but only he saw it at night, when he unbuttoned her stiff winter collar and kissed the pulse there.)

 


End file.
